Food Storage

Freezing food for storage is like creating your own Frozen Food section, but in your own home!  We have harvested our fruits and vegetables, butchered our meat or processed our wild game.  Now What?  Let’s get this food in the freezer of course.  Freezing food is very simple and helps retain nutrients and flavor.  One exception, if you’ve just harvested a deer, the backstrap should be dinner and not be put in the freezer… yum.

Tools and Equipment for Freezing Food

Before diving into the freezing process, you’ll need a few basic tools to get started:

Quality Containers: Invest in heavy-duty freezer containers to keep your soups, stocks and other liquids in the freezer.

Vacuum Sealer: Some might say a vacuum sealer is not mandatory, but for use it certainly is.  A vacuum sealer removes air from bags or containers, reducing the risk of freezer burn and extending the shelf life of your food.  Plus it will flatten out items making more available space.

Permanent Markers and Labels: You absolutely need to label your food,  What it is, when it was frozen and any other information you want to write down.

Cutting Boards and Knives: Chopping, dicing, slicing.  I can see the food flying now.  Just like when butchering knives are one of your most important tools.  Chopping veggies and fruit prior to storage is a must as portioning out our meat.

Freezer Paper or Wax Paper: Do your part to help stop freezer burned meat.  Buy freezer paper.  All joking aside, freezer paper does help reduce freezer burn.  Plus, putting wax paper between your hamburger patties will definitely help separate them when the time comes.  

Freezing Food for Storage Techniques:

Blanching: Similar to the sauna / ice bath process for humans, but with a different intent.  Drop veggies in boiling water, then move to ice-cold water to stop the cooking process.  This helps preserve color and texture when freezing vegetables for storage.

Flash Freezing: No more clumps of frozen fruits or vegetables.  Freezing them on a tray first and then putting them into your vacuum sealer will help them not stick together when it’s time to use them. This works well for berries, sliced fruit, and chopped vegetables.

Pre-Freezing: Portioning out soups, stews and stocks prior to freezing can be extremely helpful.  You can use ice cube trays or plastic containers to freeze portion sizes.  Then simply transfer them to a vacuum sealed bag.

Freezers and Freezer Types:

Upright Freezers: These freezers resemble a refrigerator and can help with limited space.  They are however easier to use to keep track of inventory since you can see all your frozen goodness simply by opening the door.  Downside is every time you open the door all the cold air escapes.

Chest Freezers: Large capacity chest freezers are the workhorse freezers for our family. They let us store a ton of items.  They are more resilient when we have short power outages, but we are always ready with the generator.  One “Con” of a chest freezer is that it is harder to keep organized.  

Walk In Freezers: We are not there yet, but how awesome would it be to have your own walk in freezer?  Age your own meat, have a perfectly organized frozen food section, eliminate the need for ice baths (FU Win Hof).  Two major reasons so few people have these types of freezers for freezing food is; Cost & Space.